Adventures in sewing – by men, for men.

Tag Archives: tuxedo-shirt

Greetings after a long absence. My personal life has been rather hectic lately, and after completing the shirt for my client’s wedding I took a break from sewing for a while.

Readers who have followed the Tuxedo Shirt saga to this point will know I actually made two shirts. The first was from a fabric that looked beautiful but was prone to wrinkling. Since the wrinkly shirt was largely complete, I took time over the past week to finish this shirt for the client. I personally put a lot of effort into it, so I did not want to see it go to waste.

For the second post in my series on the Tuxedo Shirt, I delve into fitting. As I had mentioned previously, fitting took longer than I had expected, even with a headstart in the form of an existing garment.

First Fitting

For the first fitting, I traced a pattern from a RTW shirt provided by the client. I produced a bodice muslin, lacking sleeves, collar and other details.

Overall, the RTW shirt already fit well. The client said the collar was slightly too tight on the RTW shirt.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, in a cozy Northern California country club with idyllic views everywhere you looked, my client Kevin beamed with pleasure as he married his beautiful bride.Also not coincidentally, he was the best-dressed man at the event.

A gorgeous pair of golden cufflinks handed down to him from his grandfather, together with a black satin bowtie and suspenders, finished the look of his bespoke, one-of-a-kind tuxedo shirt.Both bride and groom were thrilled with the way our project turned out – the shirt added a personal touch to a formal outfit.And I was thrilled too.

I won’t include wedding photos here, out of respect for the bride and groom, but I’ll illustrate how the project turned out.I’m planning four installments to this series:

I’ve been devoting so much time to my Tuxedo Shirt project that I haven’t had time to blog as I go. I’ll fill in more details after the job is done, but here’s an update in the interim.

Fitting

After several rounds of fitting, the good news is that I’ve arrived at a shirt pattern that fits the client.

I got a trial-by-fire lesson in sleeve fitting, which I had not had a chance to practice on myself before trying out on the client. After draping the muslin and tracing out the client’s armscye directly on the muslin, I drafted a new sleeve to match.

I started by making a new sleeve pattern, using a draft I learned in Paul Gallo’s patternmaking and design course I took in January. Contrary to the original sleeve that came with the model shirt, and also contrary to many men’s dress shirts, I used a much higher sleeve cap based upon measurements from my client.

Here’s the first sleeve draft that I produced; it was a little tight around the bicep and the wrists because I didn’t get the measurements right. But you get an idea of the overall shape of the sleeve cap. The solid pencil is the stitching line, I added both 1/2 inch (dashed) and 5/8 inch (red) seam allowances.